On Nov 21, 2012, at 12:40 PM, Jeremie BOUSQUET <jeremie.bousquet(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, it's the same thing I agree. Yep, we would need contributions for other issue trackers but once we start having something it may attract devs to develop other integrations. Thanks -Vincent

On Nov 21, 2012, at 2:33 PM, Guillaume Lerouge <guillaume(a)xwiki.com> wrote: I think that not being a developer you completely miss the point :) Market? Who's talking about marketing/research studies, etc here? :) Who's "we"? Definitely. Thanks -Vincent

Hi again, On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote: Following this type of logic, if you were working on Microsoft Office you'd start adding code-highlighting features in order to make it more appealing to developers. Sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? What matters for the long-term success of any piece of software is to have users who love using it. Those users do not necessarily have to be developers. Developers tend target platforms where they know they will be able to reach numerous users. So I'd go about this the other way: build a platform that people love using, and developers will come. Which is exactly why I'm answering. I don't think having additional committers start working on this topic (instead of focusing on topics that have a direct impact on a large majority of XWiki users, such as search for instance) is a good idea. Guillaume

On 11/21/2012 09:15 AM, Vincent Massol wrote: Well said, Vincent. I agree with Vincent. This has also been my vision for a very long time. And yes, this is *definitely* the *best* thing that we can do to get XWiki popular/famous, and as a consequence, to get more customers for all the companies that want to base their business on the XWiki open source products. Why? Well, XWiki SAS has been pursuing the same business model for many years, and while it did grow, I've seen many more open source startups grow exponentially into multi-million businesses in far shorter times, and they did that by being popular in the developer community. That's a lame analogy. Although some say that "XWiki is the Excel of the Web", what does the XWiki Platform have in common with an Office suite? I've always presented XWiki as a "web application development platform", and not as a "wiki engine". And a development platform needs development features. Feel free to view XWiki any way you want, even as a MS Office alternative that doesn't need code highlighting, but keep in mind that you're just one member of the community, and you don't exclusively control the vision of the project and the direction in which other community members want to move. To counter your example even more, MS did go even deeper than code highlighting in MS Word: they developed an open source (!) Office extension for AsmL, which allowed researchers to write formal specifications inside Word documents, and those specifications could be validated and compiled directly from within Word. Why would they do that? The official reason for embedding such a feature in Word was that researchers will write such formal models in their publications anyway, so why copy/paste them from an external tool when they could write and validate the models straight in their paper, and reviewers could just validate the models straight from Word? This wasn't a move toward attracting a much larger user base than what Word already had, it was a move with network effects in mind targeting a very very specific userbase, but with large ripple effects. It was a move toward keeping researchers using MSOffice, and transitively Windows, instead of other open source tools that didn't require any MS products, and researchers and other academic personnel in turn influence a lot of people. Let me remind you that most of the users that you're targeting are simple users of a customized enterprise solution built by XWiki SAS employees, hiding all the development features behind easy to use interfaces. Those kinds of users will rarely be developers. While I agree in general that building a great solution for users will bring developers, that won't happen when you dumb down the solution so that no user will feel the need to tinker with the code, when you hide the fact that there's even the option of tinkering with the code, and when you explicitly oppose the idea of becoming more appealing to developers. How many developers did we get from our enterprise users? I don't remember any. Almost all the community members that actively participate in the community are advanced users, sysadmins or developers that use XWiki as developers, not as end users. XWiki has great features that excited all the other open source developers that I've had the chance to talk with, but nobody knows what XWiki is because so far we've explicitly avoided getting into that "market". Nobody is working on performance because none of our users are big enough to need better performance. Put XWiki behind several high profile communities, and we'll get our performance improved in no time. That is your opinion. I think that getting XWiki known in the open source world is the best way to get new users as well. You think that clients can only come from marketing campaigns, while I think that having a product widely adopted by developers is a much better alternative. Did mysql become a billion dollar company by trying to keep open source developers away, and targeting only enterprise users that could afford to pay for it? I see in XWiki the potential to be the next Ruby on Rails, and RoR is a successful web application development framework without enterprise features, yet it still manages to have a lot of monetary value around it. Another aspect is that many times members of other open source communities have a day job in another company, and employees that are good enough to be in an open source community usually have a strong enough voice in their company to be able to suggest solutions such as XWiki. If for the next project they have to do they suggest XWiki instead of Drupal, or if they suggest XWiki Enterprise as a better alternative to their current intranet solution, it's a win for us. At least some of those companies will opt for proper support from one of the companies developing the XWiki software. I agree that not spreading our development resources too thin is a good idea, since we don't really have many developers, but I don't agree that the only "market" for XWiki is the one you see. While the "platform for developers" market is indeed crowded, this is also a highly dynamic market where winners change often based on their merits, and I believe that XWiki has a lot of merits (especially if we fix the performance). Now, to answer Vincent's original email, I do agree with this proposal, and frankly it's one that I've been trying to pursue myself since the beginning, although I've been constantly pushed into other directions. This is also what I'm thinking of proposing as a talk for FOSDEM. Some other tools that we could include: * Poll application for decision making * Presentation application, plus * Event organizing and scheduling (we wrote something for the Community Building and Marketing devroom that I'm co-organizing at FOSDEM) * The l10n application -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu

Hi, In defense of Guillaume's position, developers are the worst group to market to, we want tools to get out of our way but provide everything we need, we want our tools to be fast and we want to extend them using <favorite language> and possibly would not even review a solution which wasn't written in that language. We do not tolerate imperfection (and use the word 'sucks' often). Even JIRA is not marketed to developers but rather to the managers who guard over them. One of XWiki's big selling points in my opinion is that it is open source so you're not going to end up in integration hell because the company needs specialized business software and their intranet solution refuses to talk to it. If we can use XWikiDev as a way to wear the system integrator hat then we get the best of dogfooding while producing a suite of extensions which might come in handy to some of our users. Overall I'd give this a cautious +1 Thanks, Caleb On 11/21/2012 09:00 AM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote:

Just to make sure my intent is clear with this idea email, here are my main points: * This idea is *not* about dropping what we're already doing. It's not even about putting this in the roadmap. We definitely need to fix things that don't work well in XWiki (search, etc). * I posted this idea because this is something I believe in and I've started working on it several years ago. The reason it's not fully there already is because I'm spending most of my time working on day to day stuff like fixing bugs, improving quality, and generally speaking following the agreed roadmap. * We need this for ourselves anyway since we're development project and we need those tools (FAQ, Release app, IRCBot app, JIRA macro, Dev Stats, etc). * The goal of this idea is not so much to attract committers but more to expand the XWiki ecosystem of extensions. The persons developing extensions are mostly developers and we need a strong ecosystem of extensions. IMO this is what can make a difference in how XWiki is known in the world. Thanks -Vincent On Dec 5, 2012, at 2:57 AM, Sergiu Dumitriu &lt;sergiu(a)xwiki.org&gt; wrote: